Bolton: US will leave NATO if Trump wins 2024 elections

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News websites
5 Aug 2023 12:57

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who had served under former US President and current Presidential candidate Donald Trump, warns that a second term for Trump will have a significant impact on US foreign policy.

Former US national security advisor John Bolton waves at the 40th anniversary celebration of Formosan Association for Public Affairs in Taipei, Taiwan, Monday, May 1, 2023. (AP)

If the Republican candidate and former US President, Donald Trump, wins the 2024 presidential elections, the US will leave NATO, former National Security Advisor during the Trump administration from April 2018 to September 2019, John Bolton, said in an interview with The Hill on Thursday.

Bolton criticized Trump's foreign policy throughout the interview whcih followed an op-ed he had written earlier in the week, titled Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.

According to Bolton, “Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” adding that “He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.”

The ex-national security advisor also criticized the former President's foreign policy legacy vis-a-vis the alliance, saying “He threatened the existence of NATO, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO.”

Bolton also addressed Republicans that have praised Trump's foreign policy, saying, “Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did."

In fact, he continued explaining that "many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.”

Bolton's op-ed revelations

In another op-ed published earlier on Tuesday, Bolton accused Trump of disdaining knowledge and highlighted that the former President even perceived “relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries," to have been "predominantly" a matter of "personality.”

According to Bolton, “Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely to see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” warning that “these characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”

The ex-national advisor also dubbed Trump as "feckless" to the extent that "when things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.”